Work has dignity. The law should reflect that.

The Protecting the Right to Organize Act would do three things that matter most: end employer captive-audience meetings (mandatory anti-union sessions during paid hours), restore card-check recognition where a majority of workers sign authorization cards (without forcing a separate election that gives employers months to retaliate), and require first-contract arbitration when employers refuse to negotiate in good faith after recognition. Roughly half of newly certified unions never reach a first contract under current rules — the law assumes good-faith negotiation that the employer side has no obligation to provide. The PRO Act also overrides state right-to-work laws, which prohibit unions from collecting fair-share fees from non-members who benefit from union-negotiated contracts. Industry opposition has been near-total since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which created the modern legal framework. The PRO Act passed the House in 2021 and 2023; both times it stalled in the Senate. Substantively, it is the most consequential pro-labor legislation seriously considered since the 1930s.

The federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr was set in 2009. It has not moved in over fifteen years — the longest stretch without an increase since the federal minimum was created in 1938. Adjusted for inflation, $7.25 in 2009 dollars is closer to $5.40 in 2025 dollars. Most states and many cities have set higher floors; thirty states now have minimums above the federal level, and a handful exceed $15. The political question is no longer whether to raise it — it's whether to index it (so it rises with inflation or median wages automatically), and whether to phase out the tipped subminimum wage of $2.13/hr (frozen since 1991). Indexing has been the standard policy in most other advanced economies for decades. The opposition argument — that minimum wage increases cause large employment losses — has been substantially weakened by recent empirical work, including the natural experiments created by state-level differentials and the post-pandemic labor market.

Employee status under the Fair Labor Standards Act and the National Labor Relations Act triggers minimum wage, overtime, unemployment insurance, workers' comp, and the right to organize. Independent contractor status triggers none of these. The economic substance test — whether a worker is genuinely running their own business or is functionally an employee — has been litigated for decades, but platform companies (Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart) have spent heavily to write themselves out of it. Proposition 22 in California, passed in 2020 with $200M+ in industry spending, carved out app-based drivers from state employment law. Several other states have followed. The federal Department of Labor's 2024 independent contractor rule reinstated a stricter multi-factor test, but enforcement remains uneven. The substantive question is simple: workers who do the work of an employee should get the protections of an employee. Whether the work is dispatched by a phone app or by a paper schedule is not a meaningful legal distinction.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration was created in 1970 with a budget that made comprehensive workplace inspection plausible. By 2025, the inspector workforce had shrunk to roughly half its 1970s peak, while the US labor force grew by more than 60%. The math means most workplaces will not be inspected in any given decade. Penalties for violations remain low — the maximum penalty for a willful violation that causes a worker's death is currently $156,259, less than many comparable corporate fines for paperwork errors. Federal heat standards have been in proposed-rule status for years. Reform options range from incremental (raise penalties, expand state OSHA capacity) to structural (a federal heat standard, criminal liability for executives at firms with repeat fatal violations, mandatory worker safety committees in establishments above a size threshold). The labor argument is that the right to a safe workplace is meaningless without enforcement.

Trade, automation, and the energy transition all displace workers. The historic American response has been retraining — community college vouchers, brochures about emerging industries, and a presumption that workers will move to where the new jobs are. The historical record on retraining is poor: outcomes vary widely by program, displaced workers are often older than the median trainee in the offered programs, and the geography of new jobs rarely matches the geography of lost ones. A serious just-transition policy looks different. Wage replacement for the duration of displacement (not unemployment insurance with a 26-week ceiling). Healthcare bridges that don't depend on COBRA premiums most workers can't afford. Pension protection — including for workers in collapsed multi-employer plans. Place-based investment that brings work to the communities that lost it, rather than asking workers to relocate to capital. Community-benefit agreements attached to public energy and infrastructure spending, requiring local hiring and labor standards. The framework is simple: structural economic change creates winners and losers; the public has a responsibility to share the gains broadly enough that the losers are not asked to absorb the full cost.